


The Cure for Anything is Salt Water

by Age or Wizardry (ageorwizardry)



Series: Sweat, Tears, or the Sea [1]
Category: The Orphan's Tales Series - Catherynne M. Valente
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-18
Updated: 2018-12-18
Packaged: 2019-09-22 02:38:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,237
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17051486
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ageorwizardry/pseuds/Age%20or%20Wizardry
Summary: Ragnhild, First and Second of her Name, becomes Saint Sigrid of the Sea Glass.





	The Cure for Anything is Salt Water

**Author's Note:**

  * For [penitence_road](https://archiveofourown.org/users/penitence_road/gifts).



And so, she steps inside a tower and loses her name.

Losing a name is not so different, after all, from losing a game of Lo Shen, or losing a life. Entering a tower is not so different from entering a glass vial, or entering a new body. All of these things she has endured before.

After that: the shave. The stories. The prayers. The readings. The illuminated manuscripts.

One day she rises from her worktable to examine the vast, decorative map upon the library wall. Even with her arm held out full length, just the end of her thumb is enough to obscure the city of Shadukiam. Her hand can blot out the entirety of the Caliph's territories.

The ocean stretches blue to the edges of the map. If all the student-Sigrids stood in front of the map together, making a line across the whole length of the wall, they still could not hide all of the ocean from view.

She returns to her work.

(Something has begun within her that has not found its place to grow yet.)

The maps. The navigation. The trigonometry. The mending of ropes and spars about the tower. The diagrams of ship design.

(Even after her year boating the river, she has still never met the sea in person. It is only blue on a map to her.)

She is given her first tattoo, and chooses to place it on her face, because of course it no longer matters whether she is beautiful. She is given her Sigrid name and accepts it in obdurate silence. She carries them both like a shell, separate from herself. She does as she is told and does not look toward whatever will come next.

* * *

After their year on the river, before untried Sigrids build their own ships themselves, they are taken to the sea to be taught the ways of seacraft that cannot be learned only by sailing the line of a river, however wide and unpredictable that river might be. For some of them, it is the first time they have ever seen the sea.

She sees the ocean—

—she sees—

...despite all the blue maps in the world, she had not realized anything could be as large as the sea.

And… although she has put her ears to shells at the behest of various Sigrids in the tower, she has never before heard anything like the waves.

The sea fills her head like a bottle and washes out anything else she might think of. She fails to attend to any of the lessons she is supposed to be there to learn. How can she hear the names of the ropes or the winds when nothing but the waves fill her ears? She misses instructions; finds the lowest spot in the boat where she can lie down closest to the waves, where others will inevitably trip over her; leans over the edge until she falls with a splash and must be fished out; is roundly cursed by all around her. She ignores them. In the crow's nest, she makes no lookout for land, only gazing down hungrily at the sea. At night she sits up at the rail instead of sleeping, watching the starlight sparkle on the dark waves; when they sleep ashore she creeps outside to lie on the raft tied to the end of the pier, heedless of the waves that splash her and the oncoming cold of winter.

 

A wave slaps her face as she lies there now and she rouses coughing from a daze of near-sleep. The cough is like a key unlocking her, and it opens into sobbing, full-voiced and pouring with tears as she cannot remember crying before in both her lifetimes.

When the storm finally leaves her, sore and tired and face pressed to the wet wood, she notices one of the teacher-Sigrids has found her on the raft and is sitting nearby with her feet in the ocean.

"The sea is deep enough to hold all your tears," Saint Sigrid of the North Wind tells her, kindness in her voice. The Sigrids are fond of their folksy sea-sayings, but she herself has always found them contemptible, ridiculous; she has considered herself above them even while rising from floor to floor in the tower, learning the Sigrids' ways.

Now she thinks she sees the use of them. When something has happened that must be marked, but no words will possibly do to express the truth of it... well, then these words may do just as well as any others to say: _I see what has happened._

She sits up a little, nods to the Sigrid in response, and splashes her face with sea water. She blows her nose into her hands, then rinses them in the sea as well. "I guess the sea has room for that, too," she says, and Sigrid snorts in gentle laughter. It is the first time she has said anything like one of the sea-sayings herself. It feels like she is saying: _I hear you._

Sigrid speaks again. "You know, when you first came to us, girl, I had you figured to probably be a library Sigrid. One of those who copies the books and maps but never sets foot on the water again once her trials are done. Not that there's anything wrong with that," she continues, in the dutiful but dubious tone of one repeating a lesson she does not quite agree with or understand, "after all, sailors on the wave need the lighthouse in the tower. But now—I think you never saw the sea before you came here, did you, love?"

She shakes her head, slowly. Saint Sigrid of the North Wind is probably right. When she entered the tower, she could see a future like that before her (if it did not hold secret assassins, who would permanently remove her from the board _quietly_ , for the convenience of everyone else in the city). She can see how it would have gone: a life of quiet solitude, built around her past and her pain like a pearl.

Now she is no bitter pearl closed up in an oyster. The horrors of her first death and five hundred years in a vial on the shelf of a necromancer have not been washed away, precisely, but they have never felt so distant as they do now. The sea has made her... not bright and shiny and new. The opposite: old and washed and transformed; a piece of sea glass so tumbled you can no longer guess what shape of bottle it originally came from.

Saint Sigrid of the North Wind accepts her silent answer. "It takes some people that way, seeing it for the first time. Knowing it for yourself. The sea changes things, doesn't it?"

She has been transformed before; it is not so different. From a goatherd girl to a Caliph's mistress; from a Caliph's mistress to a Papess; from a Papess to a corpse and a necromancer's plaything. From that insubstantial wraith to a Papess again, and then to a vanquished foe and a novice. And now, changed again: but what has she become?

One of the Sigrids in the tower makes sculptures, like stained glass, from the tumbled sea glass he has found on shorelines. What could she make of herself now?

Saint Sigrid of the North Wind continues, "Once we send you lot back up to the Tower—"

The words are like a fresh slap of seawater to her face, and she doesn't hear the rest of what Sigrid says. To stay in the Tower of St. Sigrid forever once seemed like it might be the only kind of peace she could find, caring for nothing either within the tower or outside it. But to be closed up there again now, after _this_ , knowing what the blue on the map really means but being kept forever apart from it—it feels like being closed up in a glass vial on a shelf again, only this time with a body to feel her suffering. She can feel the tight cord of hot surprised sorrow in her chest, hot tears starting to spill over in her eyes. How many tears will she cry, how many days will she carry this new pain in her body before she can make herself again into unfeeling, uncaring glass?

"Saints ashore, child!" The Sigrid finally breaks in on her thoughts. "Don't crawl back into yourself like a crab into a shell, not about _that_. Don't think I'm saying you have to stay in the Tower for good. There are plenty of sea missions available for Sigrids as want them, from teaching here at the shore, to surveying and updating our maps, to ceremonial piracy. We'd never want to take someone away from the sea who wanted to stay there. Not in our order."

Her heart is fluttering like a gull's wings, and she can breathe again, if shakily. She hardly knows what to think. "To work on the sea, in the freedom of the world," she begins, unsure how to continue. When she first entered the tower, she assumed everyone knew who she was, her history. After a time, it started to seem that perhaps it could be true that she was considered merely an anonymous novice, not significantly different from any of the others—perhaps one shaven-headed young person is not so easy to distinguish among all the others, after all. But surely someone, somewhere in power, must still care about who she used to be, and the threat she posed to the city that is now her home. "Would Al-a-Nur really allow _me_ to do that?" she finally continues, unsure if she will need to explain further.

The solid certainty in the other Sigrid's answering gaze tells her that no explanation will be necessary. "When you entered our Tower, you became subject to our authority. All Towers serve the Papess, yes, but she does not interfere in our internal affairs. I'm not one of those who decides the assignments for members of our order, but as long as you truly desire sea-duty—and I can tell them that you do—I see nothing that would prevent your being assigned to it eventually."

 

She stays to join the next batch of Sigrids learning seacraft, and this time she throws herself into the lessons—after having been tumbled beneath the waves for days, she has pushed her head above the surface again and shaken the seawater out of her ears. She learns the lines and the sails and the winds and the watches. She takes her shifts at the wheel and in the crow's nest and at the charts. One day near the end when they stop at an island for something of a holiday, she gathers her new vigor like wind billowing a sail and lets it push her to run as far down the sandy shore as she can, till she's stopped by gigantic rocky crags tumbling down to the water, then runs back along the shore to where the rest of the Sigrids are building a bonfire and singing sea-shanties as the evening draws in. She even joins in on a low harmony for one song, after first tucking herself into a quiet shadow—she has not chosen to sing since she completed the required singing course in her novitiate.

(She drops a knife on the sand and walks away rather than use it to fillet a fish for her dinner. She still cannot bear any feeling of a knife cutting through flesh.)

Later she looks for the island on the ship's maps. It's so tiny that the first map doesn't show the island at all; the second shows it only as a speck. She finds only one map that shows a discernible outline of its shore, and she traces the course she ran: _this is as far as I can run in an afternoon and come back._ She calculates that scrap of shoreline against all the coastlines in the world, and the size of the sea stretching between them: she runs out of numbers that will fit in her head. The sea is the greatest nation of all, mastered by many yet ruled by no one, and once she knows its ways she can be made to bow only to the necessity of wind and wave, and not to any other person.

When these last students of the season are sent back to the Tower ahead of the winter storms, she stands in the stern of the boat and watches the sea for as long as she can, until the last edge melts into the horizon and vanishes beyond the banks of the river. She knows she'll come back down this way again in the spring, to build her own boat and truly earn her title of Saint Sigrid at last.

For the first time, Saint Sigrid of the Sea Glass sees a future in front of her that she cares about, one that depends neither on others' control of her nor on her control of others. It feels improbably bright, this future, like something that can't belong to her. Something she's stolen, like the body she lives in every day. But she will sail into that future as long and as far as she can, for as long as she is allowed to keep it.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks, as always, to rhythmia for the beta.
> 
> The title comes from the saying, "The cure for anything is salt water: sweat, tears, or the sea," which is a somewhat incorrect transmission of a quotation originally by Isak Dinesen, as discussed here: <https://quoteinvestigator.com/2018/05/30/salt/>


End file.
